9 The Smallpox Epidemic

SXWÓXWIYMELH - The shallow depressions left by long vanished pit houses were lined up in a neat row along the banks of the Fraser River.

Nine of them were visible. Another 27 lay hidden in the scant underbrush.  So, 36 in all, home, probably, to about 200 people.

Sunlight filtered in through a rustling canopy of leaves and the Fraser slid silently by its polished gravel banks, a river of sparkling green light just beyond a rustling screen of willow and spindly alder reaching for the sun. But no birds sang in the shadows and there was an eerie stillness to the place.

Simon Fraser likely didn't even notice the slight opening in the trees, when his brigade passed, finally out of the mountains and riding the booming freshet late on the afternoon of June 29, 1808. That's because there was nobody there.

Sxwóxwiymelh, on what's now the Chawathil Indian Reserve, about 10 kilometres west of Hope on Highway 7, had been abandoned for more than 25 years by the time Fraser passed in his canoes bound for the sea.

The turf-clad log roofs had already collapsed into the subterranean dwellings, burying the woven mats, the decorated cedar baskets and carved wooden utensils, the colourful dog-hair blankets, the earth floor packed so smooth it seemed like a synthetic material.

 Then, season after season, as the rotting wood slumped, the depressions had filled with leaf drift and storm debris until all that remained was a hint of their presence so faint that I'd never have noticed them if Sto:lo historian and cultural advisor Sonny McHalsie hadn't guided me.

Those shallow depressions were more than archaeological curiosities, they were mass graves, enduring evidence of a culture-shattering event that had traumatized entire societies for many generations.

Translated from Halkomelem into English, the name of the abandoned village means something like "a lot of people died all at once."

According to Sto:lo elder Susan Peters, McHalsie said, people at Sxwóxwiymelh had died at the rate of 25 to 30 victims a day. Those still alive placed the bodies in their pit houses, then burned them and collapsed the roofs to cover corpses that were piling up too fast to be disposed of according to traditional burial rites. Any survivors fled.

What killed them so suddenly and in such numbers may have been a hemorrhagic form of smallpox, a pestilence that moved swiftly and with horrific, almost always lethal effects.

Accounts reported by a Roman Catholic missionary in 1847 and cited by Elizabeth Fenn in her book Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 give an inkling of the cataclysm.

Jesuit Gregory Mengarini said that he was told of a plague about 70 years earlier by Flathead informants who had been neighbours of the Kootenays in what's now northern Idaho and Montana, Fenn wrote. The victims, he was told, developed either red pustules, after which they died a few days later, or they developed black pustules from which death was almost immediate for almost 100 per cent of those infected.

The latter symptom, Fenn suggests, sounds like a hemorrhagic form of smallpox in which those infected bleed out through the eyes, nose and other orifices as the virus attacks internal mucous membranes. Those afflicted thus succumb more quickly and in much greater numbers than those suffering the more usual symptoms. The mortality rate tops 97 per cent.

In another account cited by Fenn, Asa Bowen Smith writing in 1840 said that very old members of the Nez Perce, neighbours of the Okanagans in Washington State, told him of a plague in their childhood which had killed almost everyone. The disease, Smith concluded, was "the most virulent form of smallpox."

These accounts are important because they help map a route for the disease across the Rocky Mountains, westward along the Snake River and then into the Columbia River system, where the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1805 reported survivors with the characteristic scarring of smallpox.

From the Columbia, of course, it was a small leap by swift sea-going canoe to the densely populated Fraser Valley and by horse to the southern Interior of B.C. where Simon Fraser reported Shoshones from the Great Plains were present in a Secwepemc camp during his journey down the river.

Whichever variant of smallpox swept across the Northwest Coast at the time that Sxwóxwiymelh was depopulated, perhaps both types, perhaps even accompanied by some other opportunistic communicable disease, it visited an almost unimaginable cataclysm upon the wealthy, complex and highly organized societies of what's now B.C.

Robert Boyd, a Portland-based anthropologist who more than 20 years ago began studying the epidemiology of introduced diseases and their impact upon what's popularly known as the Pacific Northwest, pieced together oral traditions, historic accounts, archaeological evidence and statistical analysis. What emerged was a truly frightening picture of the catastrophic effects of smallpox upon a population with no natural antibodies or immunities.

In doctoral research that he refined into his book The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874, Boyd estimates - conservatively, he acknowledges - that an epidemic which entered what's now B.C. in 1784 had a mortality rate of at least 30 per cent.

The Sto:lo people themselves in You Are Asked To Witness: The Sto:lo in Canada's Pacific Coast History, edited by University of Saskatchewan historian Keith Thor Carlson, who also serves as historian to the Sto:lo, estimate that two-thirds of the population perished within weeks of contracting the disease.

To place that demographic event in a contemporary perspective, imagine returning to Greater Vancouver from a summer vacation to find 1.5 million of your neighbours dead, many of their houses razed, those still standing full of corpses, the streets littered with bodies decomposing where they fell and the stunned, grieving survivors starving in the ruins because the entire infrastructure for food procurement was in a shambles.

Many of us are still moved by the iconic image of an abandoned Chinese baby crying in the ruins during the Japanese "rape" of Nanking just before the Second World War. Among the Sto:lo there is a similar image, although rather than a physical representation it is one flashed into the collective memory of what was and in part remains an oral culture.

You Are Asked To Witness recounts the story told by Peter Pierre, an elder from Katzie who was born in 1861. His story was collected by the great New Zealand-born ethnologist Diamond Jenness, who later served as chief anthropologist at the National Museum of Canada.

Pierre told of his great-grandfather whose wife had recently given birth to twins. Custom required the parents of twins and their babies be sequestered away from the community for several months and he had taken his family up into the mountains.

When he returned to the village, which was located where Pitt Lake empties into the Pitt River, "all his kinsmen and relatives lay dead in their homes; only in one house did there survive a baby boy, who was vainly sucking at his dead mother's breast. They rescued the child, burned all the houses together with the corpses that lay inside and built a new home for themselves several miles away. If you dig today on the site of any of the old villages you will uncover countless bones, the remains of Indians who perished during this epidemic of smallpox."

Valerie Patenaude, the archaeologist who is curator at the Maple Ridge Museum, found just such physical evidence when she did rescue excavations at a Pitt River site near the Fraser that was threatened by highway expansion.

"It was a huge site, well over a kilometre long," she told me. "There were two occupation periods. The first was from 4,800 to 2,400 years ago. Then it was reoccupied from about 1,500 to 250 years ago. Then it was abandoned quite abruptly."

Patenaude's excavations found all kinds of artifacts that weren't supposed to be there. For example, a form of women's lip ornament called a labret that was normally not found at grave sites because it was passed from generation to generation, mother to daughter to granddaughter.

"But at the Pitt River site we found hundreds of labrets, all charred and blackened with fire. It was probably a smallpox epidemic. Yet neither the Katzie nor the Coquitlams claimed descent from those people. It's a strong possibility that site was used by people from South Vancouver Island who just never came back after the catastrophe."

And 150 kilometres to the southwest at Port Angeles, Washington, the excavation of a Clallam village site uncovered during a construction project yielded similar evidence with burned house planks, abandoned tools, graves with multiple interments, unusual rituals and "children, dozens of them 12 years old or younger," reported Lynda Mapes for the Seattle Times in 2005. Radiocarbon samples from the site dated some of the burials to the period between 1780 and 1800.

If the Sto:lo assessment of mortality is correct, then considered as a percentage of population, the disaster that befell the people of the Northwest Coast from 1782 to 1784 was of greater magnitude than what was visited upon civilians by the worst horrors of the Second World War, including the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The atomic bombs killed 40 per cent and about 25 per cent of those cities' populations respectively. The smallpox in the Northwest appears to have killed a far greater percentage of the population in a few weeks.

The horror of the experience certainly entered the collective consciousness of the grieving survivors. It did so with such power and pervasiveness that the stories later collected by ethnologists are frightening even today.

Geographer Cole Harris, writing in the journal Ethnohistory in 1994 in a paper entitled Voices of Disaster: Smallpox around the Strait of Georgia in 1782, quotes another Sto:lo elder, Jimmy Peters, as saying that when he was a child shortly after the First World War he was forbidden to play near sites such as Sxwóxwiymelh because he might dream about the victims and what happened to them and if he experienced those dreams he might soon afterwards die suddenly, like them.

 The survivors, of course, sought to frame their understanding of what had happened in the metaphors and imagery of their own cosmology and oral literature but not by using the clinical explanations that descend from western European science and scholarship.

Harris cited an 1899 paper in the American Antiquarian by Ellen Webber of Vancouver who wrote that some years earlier a Kwantlen had told her that the disease came from a supernatural creature whose breath cause sores to break out on the skin of anyone whom it touched.

"They burned with heat and they died to feed this monster."

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